Archives for April 2014

Foodbanks have been back in the news over the past week, most notably with two rather vicious attacks on the people who use them. First came the Mail on Sunday with its investigative journalistic piece on how apparently easy it is to get your hands on a food parcel if you’re devious enough. The second, though not especially new (welfare minister Lord Freud had made the same point some months back), came from former minister Edwina Currie.

She argued that people are using foodbanks (much like some climb mountains) because they are there, and in growing numbers.

1 million people may be very hard up but they are not going hungry

The undercover piece may have been pretty mean-spirited – arguably it isn’t easy enough to get a food parcel because in most cases the gatekeepers at the Council, jobcentre, etc decide who does and doesn’t qualify – but it was the first real evidenced challenge (putting to one side the anti-poor prejudices of Tory commentators) to those such as the Trussell Trust making wild claims about a million or more people going hungry.

The rise in take-up of food parcels from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands is largely welfare-related

I see no reason to challenge the view of the government’s critics that it is welfare reforms in the form of a greater use of sanctions, the bedroom tax, the benefit cap, and fitness to work tests; alongside delays in payments, the abolition of the social fund in favour of less generous local authority-run emergency assistance schemes, and in all likelihood a deliberate attempt to shift the welfare burden onto the charity sector; that is responsible for the sudden and steep rise in food banks and food parcels.

But is there something else going on too?

You’d think ‘Egwina’ would steer clear of food-related controversies given her infamous run-in with the salmonella crisis that ended her political career. But in a way, I’m glad she did. For all their faults, there is a certain logic to the argument put forward by Currie, Freud and others that can’t be so easily dismissed.

There used to be a stigma about accepting charity – nobody wanted to be a ‘charity case’ – but given the riots of 2012 and what that said about the breakdown of some communities, and of the kinds of traditional working class values of which such an attitude was once a definitive part, would it be surprising if there were a greater readiness to accept charity today? As Currie herself argued, growing up in a working class family in Liverpool her mother always made sure to ‘put food on the table’ whatever the hardships she and the family otherwise endured. Similarly, as one rather controversial Labour-supporting social landlord has reminisced, his mother (unlike his tenants) would always be sure to pay her rent on time.

The instilling of these sorts of values may not have gone completely out of fashion, but – as I argued on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Stephen Nolan programme the night after he interviewed Currie (from 1:24:40) – to the extent that this is the case, maybe she has a point. Maybe, just maybe there is a greater readiness on the part of an increasing minority of people to accept, or even seek out, charity in the form of food parcels; rather than, as previous generations would have, fall back on their own resources or seek help from family and community?

Of course, it is hardly surprising that some people are struggling to get by when jobs are scarce, and the cost of living is going up. The economic crisis, not just the recent downturn, is all too real and unprecedented in its apparent resistance to the interventions of a clueless political class. But exaggerating the extent of the so-called ‘food poverty’ problem isn’t helping anybody. It only turns those struggling on the breadline (so to speak) into victims. Instead of trying to close down debate (like the foodbanks lobby have been doing following that Mail on Sunday article) or emoting all over the place – as the Daily Mirror did, apparently without outcry, with its use of a stock photo of a crying American child on its front page to illustrate its ‘shock report’ into foodbanks – we need to establish where the real problem lies. It is only by doing this that we can ultimately do anything about it.

People used to go on marches to demand change in a very public show of strength. This weekend’s protests in Britain calling for the abolition of the bedroom tax turned the meaning of protest on its head.

A year on from the introduction of the bedroom tax – or the removal of the spare-room subsidy, as the government prefers to call it – the marchers in London, Leeds, Cardiff and elsewhere were not demanding radical change. Their cause was a conservative one. The demonstrators were against any kind of reform – on the bedroom tax as well as any other welfare reform – because of the impact it may have on ‘the vulnerable’. Of the estimated 660,000 households affected by the bedroom tax, it is estimated that 440,000 contain people with disabilities. Disability campaigners in particular have a deserved reputation for radical protests in the 1970s and 1980s, fighting for the freedom and equality of disabled people. It is ironic, therefore, that this weekend’s protesters found themselves in opposition to the bedroom tax, which, at least in part, is designed to give disabled people greater autonomy.

Yes, the bedroom tax is as awful as opponents say it is. Few can afford to lose the 14 per cent or 25 per cent of their housing benefit that a spare room or two will cost them; and many disabled people dispute the idea that the room containing equipment they rely on is ‘spare’. The mean-spiritedness of this ‘tax’ is clear, not to mention the incompetence of those responsible for it. Indeed, the bedroom tax has simply failed to do the two things it set out to achieve: free-up stock in the scandalously cramped social-housing sector and save public money. Those claimants who have been forced out of their homes have ended up in more expensive private-sector accommodation because of the shortage of social housing. Therefore, the bedroom tax has done nothing to lower the housing-benefit bill.

Still, accusing the government of cruelly punishing the poor and vulnerable is patronising. It diminishes the humanity of those on welfare and turns them into objects of pity. On the other hand, the government’s adoption of the radical notion that people with disabilities can be independent when given the right support, and that many of them are able to work and needn’t be claiming benefits, is worth supporting. The fact that this weekend’s protesters, those who have appointed themselves defenders of the disabled, are demanding a return to the state-dependent status quo suggests that people with disabilities are not so much disabled by society – as the old slogan went – as they are by those claiming to represent them.

Dave Clements Limited

I am a writer and consultant with over fifteen years experience working in senior strategic, management, project and engagement roles, and advising local government, the NHS and other public sector and VCS organisations. I am available for commissions.